INTEL LAUNCHES NEW BITCOIN MINING CHIP, BLOCKSCALE
Intel’s new bitcoin mining chip, the Intel Blockscale ASIC, will ship in Q3 2022 to select customers. (Bitcoin Magazine, April 2022)

STOP! Before you read even one more sentence of this article: if you are currently doing research on cryptocurrencies, this article isn’t for you. You are doing great – congratulations, my friend! Get back to researching that sweet, sweet crypto!

OK, now it’s just you folks who haven’t seen the light. Time to wake up, sheeple! You need to stop working on whatever flavor of irrelevant nonsense you are currently doing, and make the move to crypto.

I know what you’re thinking: “but Emery, I like the irrelevant nonsense I’m currently working on! I like coming up with neato solutions to non-problems!” Sure you do! Who among us doesn’t? But what if I told you that you can still work on irrelevant nonsense, but with the irrelevant nonsense that is crypto, you can get rich! You can even tell your parents that you work on the very thing that Elon Musk likes!

I know what you’re thinking: “but Emery”, you say, “this all just sounds too good to be true!” I’m here to tell you that it’s ALL good and it’s ALL true. You just need to start researching crypto, and you need to start now.

Crypto is good for nature!

• Do you like trees? So does crypto! Crypto mining is producing millions of metric tons of CO2 every year. What’s CO2, you may ask? WELL IT’S THE STUFF TREES BREATHE.
• Do you like warm weather? Who doesn’t? Crypto sure does! All that CO2 is helping to make the world warmer. Take off your coats and PUT ON CRYPTO.
  

Crypto has amazing impact!

• Want to make a visible impact on the world? Crypto is where it’s at! Every year, more efficient new crypto mining hardware comes out. And every year, everyone throws away their old crypto mining hardware. This is making literal MOUNTAINS of WASTE. If you make crypto mining more efficient, your research impact could be visible for miles – possibly FROM SPACE!
• Before crypto, your research might get you some polite applause at a conference in some anodyne location like San Jose. But when you work on crypto, your research could help trigger actual RIOTS IN THE STREETS in exotic places like Kazakhstan – WHERE BORAT LIVES!
• Crypto is all about making society better. Tired of the hustle and bustle of everyday life? So is crypto! Crypto slows things WAY down, giving you time to enjoy life’s pleasures. Unlike with credit cards, where you wait only 10 seconds or so for a transaction to go through, with crypto, you get to wait FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES. Think of all the time you will have to catch up on e-mail, doomscroll through Twitter, or just plain reflect on the series of life choices that led you to this point!

Crypto’s both interdisciplinary and disruptive!

• By working on crypto, you are not just doing computer science – you are helping spur innovation in financial sectors! For example, crypto’s also great for selling digital assets like pictures. But what if I told you that you don’t even have to sell the pictures, but instead you sell hashes to URLs to a website that hosts that picture, and these sell for millions of dollars? It’s all true! Remember those old schemes, like Ponzi, pyramid, and pump-and-dump? Yes, Crypto supports all of these but also SO MUCH MORE.

Crypto…it’s just plain cool!

• Do you like Vikings? So does crypto! Crypto mining is currently consuming as much energy as Denmark – WHERE THE VIKINGS CAME FROM.
• Do you like mobsters? So does crypto! With crypto, you can actually BE A MAFIOSO FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR HOME. Get directly involved in cool stuff you see in movies, like drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, and more! When you tell people how your latest paper killed, it might literally be true! Plus, you get to pick your own cool mob name, which instantly makes any computer scientist 10,000 times cooler: think “Lunatic Les” Lamport, Don “Knuckles” Knuth, or even Mike “The Stonebreaker” Stonebraker!

Never in human history has there been an opportunity like crypto!

• Think about it: humanity has dreamed for centuries of turning base materials into gold. With crypto, that dream has finally become reality! With the magic of crypto mining, it is possible to literally convert tons of dirty, filthy coal into fabulous cryptocurrency gold! That coal was just sitting under the ground, being dirty and useless, and now we’re turning it into money!
• For millennia, humanity has labored under the yoke of taxes and irritating “laws” that, as any rich criminal, uh, I mean successful entrepreneur, will tell you, are holding back humanity from reaching its true potential. Crypto is practically made for avoiding both!

And it’s so easy to get started!

• Tired of the challenges of setting up and running benchmark suites? Imagine a world where there is just one benchmark. Not only that – that benchmark is just a single function! How awesome would that be? I’m here to tell you that that world is here today. Repeat after me: HOLY SHA-2!

Now that I know you are on board, I want to let you in on an amazing deal, JUST FOR YOU. I’m selling NFTs of JPEGs of the first pages of some of my most highly-cited papers. They’re an AMAZING investment opportunity – act now!

About the Author:

Emery “the Memory” Berger.uneth is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He takes his salary entirely in meme currencies.

Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the Computer Architecture Today blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGARCH or its parent organization, ACM.